Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.

Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

既真实又不真实，死者是人，但他们又不是。中世纪的欧洲社会发展了一套关于死亡和来世的丰富的想象力传统，把死者作为思考自我、再生和损失的切入点。这些令人毛骨悚然的关注体现在关于回归的死者的故事的广泛流行中，他们既作为无实体的精神，又作为活的尸体或复仇者与活人互动。在《余生》中，南希-曼德维尔-卡西奥拉探讨了1000年后的五百年间欧洲活人与死者关系的这一非凡现象。

卡西奥拉同时考虑了基督教和异教的信仰，展示了某些传统是如何随着时间的推移而生存和演变的，以及在不同的背景和社会阶层中，人们的态度是如何分歧和重叠的。正如她所展示的，基督教末世论与各种异教来世想象的交集--从地中海的古典异教到北欧本土的日耳曼、凯尔特、斯拉夫和斯堪的纳维亚异教--随着基督教在欧洲的传播，将关于死者的新文化价值观带入了基督教的范畴。事实上，事实证明，教会对这些影响的开放程度令人惊讶，它以不可预测的方式吸收了关于死亡和来世的新形象。然而，随着时间的推移，地区文化和信仰的持续存在将被日益集中的教会等级制度的影响所抵消。在这一切中，有一件事是不变的：中世纪的人们深深渴望将生者和死者聚集在一起，形成一个世代相传的单一社区。